‘Is there any bread left?’ The answer in Tunisia is often no.

“Is there any bread left?” the woman yells as she runs across the street, dodging honking and swerving cars on the busy Tunis road.

“This is my sixth bakery today,” she tells the line of customers in between gasps of air. “If they are out, I will go home empty-handed.”

Twelve years after a democratic revolution that demanded “bread, freedom, and dignity,” Tunisians today are preoccupied with bread. Specifically, where to find some.

The cash-strapped North African country is struggling with shortages of several imported staples: rice, pasta, sugar, coffee, and some medicines. But none is hitting citizens as hard as the shortage of wheat, the core ingredient of Tunisian cuisine: couscous, nawaser, baguettes, and pizza.

It comes as the country faces a constellation of crises: climate change-driven drought and fires, soaring public debt, Ukraine war price shocks, plummeting foreign currency reserves, and decades of bad policy.

Worsening the crisis, economists say, is a populist president who is barely at the helm, putting his personal popularity over badly needed economic reforms.

As Tunisia nears bankruptcy, President Kais Saied lashes out at scapegoats and political rivals, offering few solutions and proving that populism performs better at the ballot box than at the kitchen table.

Boatloads of wheat

The immediate cause of the bread shortage is the inability of cash-strapped Tunisia, which is struggling to repay foreign lenders a decade’s worth of loans, to pay for wheat imports.

Eight cargo ships packed with wheat are currently anchored off the port of Tunis, refusing to offload their cargo until they get paid by the government.

The import and marketing of wheat, like that of other goods in Tunisia, are highly centralized. All wheat must go through the government Cereals Office, which purchases and imports the country’s grains and distributes them to mills, markets, and licensed bakeries as flour through a quota system. 

Under current quotas and availability, bakeries are receiving 10% to 20% of their normal flour supplies.

Yet only the Cereals Office can legally import grains. Those wishing to secure their own flour or semolina must resort to the marché noir – the black market.

While restaurants, hotels, and unlicensed and upmarket bakeries are able to secure unsubsidized flour from “sources,” the vast majority of Tunisians are obliged to race around each day in search of a bakery that has bread.

They can be few and far between.

On a late August Monday, dozens of bakeries were shuttered on the main road from Tunis to Tabarka.

In a northwest Tunis neighborhood at 11 a.m., 40 customers were waiting in a line outside of a bakery in the sun, a common sight in the country. Most had been there for an hour in 98-degree-Fahrenheit heat.

“We are taking off half days from work just to buy bread,” says Faten, anxiously checking the time on her phone. She would soon have to race across town to her job as a hotel housekeeper.

“Bread dominates our lives and schedules now,” she says. “It is literally running our lives.”

A testy argument breaks out in the line over the reasons for the shortages. Some blame the war in Ukraine; others blame hoarders and monopolies. A few single out climate change. The debate over the government’s role in the crisis is interrupted by whispers that the flour is finished.

The baker comes out and delivers the bad news: no more bread. The empty-handed customers disperse and roam in search of another bakery.

Working-class and disadvantaged Tunisians – who purchase durum and soft flour to make homemade couscous, bread, and pasta for their families and to sell at markets – are being hit the hardest.

“We don’t see flour, sugar, or coffee. Fish and meat haven’t entered our house in a year,” Um Romdhane says as she picks through half a bowl of uncooked lentils on her front stoop – dinner for her family.

“Where are the officials?” she cries. “Where is the leadership?”

Tunisia’s Ministry of Agriculture declared in July that the country’s wheat harvest slumped this year by 60% due to drought and record-high temperatures, down to 250,000 tons – an amount economic and agriculture experts say is enough only to reseed for next year.

After importing 60% of its wheat needs in 2023, Tunisia is now on track to import 100% of its wheat in 2024. The country does not have enough foreign currency reserves to pay for this year’s supplies.

Populist approach

Mr. Saied has so far offered no strategy to boost food security, address climate change, compensate farmers, or boost water resources. Instead, he has favored tough stances, macho speeches, public spectacles, and arrests – often making the shortages worse.

Last year Mr. Saied imposed a law against speculators, imposing 10- to 30-year prison sentences for those convicted of speculating or manipulating food prices.

In August he fired the Cereals Office director and arrested the president of the national bakeries chamber on charges of hoarding.

Last month the president barred unlicensed bakeries and restaurants from using subsidized flour – leading to the shuttering of hundreds of bakeries and to baker protests that led him to backtrack two weeks later.

At the Gourgabiya Bakery in Kairouan, in central Tunisia, workers churn out loaves of traditional semolina-aniseed taboon bread as the line of customers grows longer.

Thanks to its black market semolina, it is one of the few bakeries operating in the town of 190,000 – albeit at a quarter of their usual output.

Police raided the bakery the previous week and shuttered it for three days.

“We have to keep working; this is our livelihood and families are counting on our bread,” baker Mohammed Ibrahim says as a customer purchases a loaf. “You can fine us, penalize us, jail us. But at the end of the day, people have to eat. That need is stronger than fear.”

Fear of reforms

Experts say solutions to the current crisis are clear.

“The solution is simple,” says Tunisian economist Ezzeddine Saidane, “if you as the state cannot provide bread and cereals for your people, let someone else who can.”

Experts say that to avert disaster, the government must loosen its grip on the economy and undertake economic reforms that post-revolution leaders avoided, such as selling off or restructuring government-owned companies, whose collective debt stands at 40% of the country’s gross domestic product.

State employees’ salaries account for 20% of GDP.

Consumer price subsidies, which have remained untouched for nearly 50 years, also need reform, many economists argue.

Thanks to a subsidy set by President Habib Bourguiba in the 1970s, a baguette costs just 0.20 Tunisian dinars, or $0.06, well below the actual cost.

Yet since Tunisia’s revolution, few politicians – whether Islamists, neoliberals, or hard-line nationalists – have been willing even to talk about economic reforms for fear of hurting their electoral support.

The trade unions, which helped bring down dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, have constantly threatened strikes over proposed reforms.

Yet Mr. Saied’s 2021 power grab, in which he suspended parliament, dismissed the prime minister, and assumed executive authority, has put Tunisia in a quandary: For the first time in 12 years, all the powers necessary to push through the economic reforms to save Tunisia are in the hands of one person.

Mr. Saied has proven unwilling to change the country’s unsustainable policies, especially when so many are integral to his populist image.

“For years we have had leaders who were more scared of their political future than of the economic situation of the country,” says Mr. Saidane. “This has not changed. Kais Saied talks but does not listen.”

A year ago, the government won a short-term reprieve when the International Monetary Fund agreed in principle to a $1.9 billion loan. The government promised to cut subsidies and sell off a few debt-ridden state companies.

Yet in April, Mr. Saied torpedoed the reforms and the IMF loan, lambasting his government’s plan and declaring that he would “not hear foreign diktats” from the IMF.

Now without an IMF loan or an alternative lender, Tunisia is racing toward default, economists warn.

Meanwhile, Tunisians scramble for small victories.

“It feels like an accomplishment,” Mohammed, a government clerk, says as he walks away from a Tunis bakery with a bag of baguette bounty – three loaves for him, his wife, and his daughter.

“You feel so relieved; it’s a kind of euphoria,” he says before a weariness spreads over his face, “until the next day when you have to do it all over again.”

Ahmed Ellali contributed to this report from Tunis.